Bozosity

The Philosophers

Let us, for the sake of discussion, define philosophy as the sum of those fields of inquiry where there is no agreed method for determining the truth. The classical defition, love of wisdom, is quite different, of course, but it points up the problem. Nobody agrees with the rest of the world on what wisdom is. Large blocks of humanity agree that their own block has it, and the others don't. So that's what I mean about having no agreed method.

Much of philosophy has been a justification of what everybody thinks they know, a fundamentally bozotic enterprise. Aristotle "proving" that the earth does not move, medieval theologians misusing Aristotelian logic to "prove" Catholic theology, and Kant "proving" that Euclidean geometry is true a priori as the form of our perceptions are all well-known in the field.

Galileo showed that motion cannot be detected; only deviations from normal motion register with our senses. This is now familiar experience in cars, trains, and airplanes, but in Galileo's time such experiences did not exist. He showed that a person riding a horse or a ship and dropping a ball sees the ball fall straight down relative to the horse or the ship, while an observer on the ground sees it move forward with the horse or the ship. This is Galilean Relativity, a fundamental step in the acceptance of Copernican astronomy (corrected by Kepler with elliptical rather than circular orbits).

The argument over Copernican astronomy was conducted in the Catholic Church using medieval methods of theology, which eventually had to be abandoned in the face of the astronomical facts.

Not long after Kant published his defense of Euclidean geometry in The Critique of Pure Reason, the mathematicians realized that there were non-Euclidean geometries. Later on the physicists concluded that the geometry of the space we live in must be determined by observation and experiment.

So if these kinds of philosophy don't work, what does? Well, mathematics and the sciences began as philosophy, and separated from it when reasonably reliable methods became available. Proof from basic assumptions (the Axiomatic Method) prevailed in math in Classical Greece. Scientific method began to prevail in the 17th century with Gilbert on magnets, Galileo on astronomy and mechanics, Kepler on planetary orbits, and the development of a comprehensive theory of motion by Descartes, Leibniz, and above all Newton.

What else has escaped from philosophy? Several sciences and the associated engineering practices, of course, and to some extent detective work. Politics and economics, no. Education, no. Most of everything else, no.

Now don't get the idea that I favor science and math for everything. Much of what is important, even essential in life is in the realm of philosophy. If we don't agree on methods, then we have to have ways of deciding what to do without agreement. That means politics. In addition, there are many realms where there are no right answers, especially music and the other arts, sports and games, and other areas where people are now allowed to make their own individual choices.

Also, don't get the idea that science and math are perfect. There have been gaps in both throughout their histories. Not enough to derail either enterprise, but enough to call for care in their use, and plenty to provide more scope for discovery. For example, some of Euclid's proofs aren't correct (although that was eventually fixed), and Newton's explanation of calculus was wrong (and that was fixed later, also). Holes in 19th century physics led to relativity and quantum mechanics, after physicists gave up trying to plug the holes on the basis of what they thought they knew.

Being a bozo is unavoidable. Finding out that you have been a bozo and doing something about it is the source of all progress. If we could agree on that, we would have a starting point for rescuing the rest of philosophy. But we can't, so we don't.

The Evolution of Bozosity

As I have noted here before, bozosity is universal among humans. We must suppose, therefore, that there is some evolutionary force behind it, that is to say some sort of survival value. Is this plausible?

Well, of course it is. Every sentient being has to act on inadequate information. Many animals act primarily on instinct, and the rest only on simple learned behaviors that have been reinforced by some degree of success. This is the same process by which B. F. Skinner taught pigeons to play a sort of ping-pong game, and casinos teach some people to pour their earnings coin by coin into slot machines. In the jargon of behavioral psychology this process of strengthening a behavior by rewarding it some of the time is called operant conditioning. Few animals can reason through a situation, and few that can do, and few that do get it right.

Being able to make decisions through conscious thought without adequate information has obvious survival value. The alternative, not deciding, is often far worse. Should I pursue this source of food or that? This potential mate or that? Should I avoid danger this way or that? In each of these cases, not deciding is far more likely to be fatal, or to result in failure to reproduce, than deciding would be. But there are other cases where not taking action is the safest thing to do.

The dangers of inaction seem to give rise to the insistence on doing something when there is nothing to do. For example, if a disease has no treatment, some people will try every quack remedy. What harm can it do, if you will certainly die without treatment? (Well, it could harm your pocketbook, certainly, but we haven't had time to evolve to take that into account emotionally. And some quack remedies can kill you, but the theory is that you were dying anyway.) We see this with people who have inoperable cancers, and with HIV/AIDS, among other problems. In some desperate situations, this insistence on trying something, anything, results in escaping the danger against all odds. This trait thus has survival value, and it does survive and continue.

On the other hand, some people don't feel impelled to do something, anything, and in some cases that works out better. Maybe the best thing to do for an ailment is nothing--bed rest and no irrelevant or even harmful medicine.

It was even more important to our ancestors in some situations that families and tribes be able to make decisions and stick to them, so there is often great survival value in following the family elder or tribal leader in a body, suspending individual judgment, and even lashing out at whoever suggests otherwise, or indeed anybody else who comes handy. This is particularly true in time of sudden external attack, as in the case of leopards or the tribe over the next hill in the distant past, or the German Blitzkrieg in Europe, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the 9/11 attacks in recent times. The impulse to self-defense is not bozotic in itself, but it has long been attached to other impulses that result in bozotic behavior, such as locking up Japanese-Americans from California during World War II while allowing those from Hawaii to serve in the U.S. military. But sometimes splitting the tribe or challenging the leader was the best strategy, and some people carry those traits instead.

However you react to terrorism, war, or disease, you are likely to take the bogus view that everybody who doesn't agree with you is bozotic or worse, and only you understand the situation. But I don't think so.

I Think We're All Bozos On This Planet.

The Curse of Darkness

Old joke:

One night a policeman found a well-dressed gentleman crawling on his knees under a lamppost, and of course asked what he was doing.

"I'm looking for my wallet," said the man.

"Oh! Would you like me to help you?" the policeman asked, and started looking all around.

After a few minutes of fruitless searching, the policeman asked, "Are you sure you lost your wallet here?"

"Oh, no," the man replied, "I lost it down the block there."

"Well, then, why are you looking here?"

"That's obvious. Right here I can see."

---

In addition to being a joke, this is a precise description of the human condition. In every area of inquiry, we deal with what we can see, and don't (can't) look elsewhere until we have a new source of illumination or a new device that lets us see in some area we couldn't explore before.

For thousands of years, astronomy was limited to what people could see with their unaided eyesight, and could calculate using Euclidean geometry. Although the accuracy of measurements increased over time, nothing new could be seen until Galileo turned a telescope to the sky, seeing for the first time some of the moons of Jupiter, sunspots, many thousands of previously unknown stars, the mountains and craters of the Moon, and much more. Every time astronomers get bigger telescopes they make astonishing new discoveries. Every time they get telescopes that can see and record in different parts of the spectrum, they make other astonishing discoveries. We can now observe neutron stars, black holes, quasars, stellar nurseries, the cosmic microwave backrgound, and much more, over the range from long-wave radio through microwaves, infrared, visible light, and ultraviolet, to X-rays. We can detect even higher-energy gamma rays, and determine the direction they come from, but we can't form images from them yet. In addition to the spectrum of photons, we can detect cosmic rays of various kinds, solar and supernova neutrinos, the gravitational effects of dark matter, and much more. Gravity-wave detectors are coming on line, and experiments are being constructed to detect dark matter directly.

In physics, what we can see depends a lot on what mathematics we know how to do. Galileo worked out the parabolic paths in a uniform gravity field using only Euclidean geometry and elementary algebra. Newton was able to work out the elliptical orbits of the planets in a non-uniform field diminishing with distance, but he needed analytic geometry and calculus to do it. Much of Einstein's difficulties in working out General Relativity were due to his lack of experience with tensor calculus. Right now in string theory, mathematicians can see into a few small corners of a huge space of possible solutions. We can't yet see into the part that has the answers we seek.

Similarly for medical instruments and tests, police investigations, and attempts to figure out how people think. We only look where we can see, even if we know there is something important elsewhere.

The most difficult case is philosophy, where people constantly try to look directly into the dark, and where much of what they think they see is made of those phantoms that you can see when you close your eyes, or at best the shapes that you think you can see sometimes at the limit of vision.

It is not only philosophy that has this problem, of course. Astronomers thought they saw long straight markings on Mars late in the 19th century. Perhaps they are natural channels, said Schiaparelli. In English translation, the speculation turned into constructed canals created by intelligent life. It turns out that Schiaparelli and others saw optical illusions.

If we understand that we are missing everything that is too small, or too distant, or too dark for our vision and our instruments, we can guard against the bozosity of assuming that only what we can see counts. But a lot of the time, we don't do this. Doctors who can't find visible signs of disease often send their patients to psychiatrists, dismissing the possibility that there is something unknown here worthy of study. Voters embrace or dismiss candidates based on sound bites. Crank theories, urban legends, and deliberate disinformation proliferate to a degree unbelievable to those who have not experienced them.

In politics, decisions are required regardless of whether we have sufficient information and understanding. Within politics, the worst case is ideology, which pretends to perfect knowledge, and distracts the public from asking how you know what you claim by means of outrage over some societal ills, which may even be real. Karl Marx was good at outrage, and a complete, though plausible, dud at economics. His followers were the economically outraged of the world. Among them they produced most, but not all, of the worst economic disasters of the 20th century such as the Chinese Communist Great Leap Backward.

So whenever you get the chance to light up some corner of the darkness, I hope you will take it, have a look around, and let the rest of us know what you can see.